The Roads Must Roll

Adventures in time and space, transcribed in future tense. Future, can you tell what will come in a hundred years, or in ten, or in the next minute? Tonight, Dimension X brings you a glimpse of what may well happen within your own lifetime.

The Robert Heinlein story, The Road Must Roll. What the drugs, oh, our job is never done to be thrown, eh? 50s that the automotive age began to die.

The traffic engineers had long expected. For years they had watched our vast cities sprawl and spread out, spill over into the countryside, become more and more dependent on motor transportation. And then finally the inevitable breaking point of view.

The growing flood of cars and buses and trucks began to swamp the streets and arterial highways. The building of roads could no longer keep pace. The superhighways clogged. congested became packed with cars stalled bumper to bumper and the city began to die of slow strangulation for the traffic for no longer road.

The engineers took over. They banned the automobile, tore up the super highways, and in their place they built the rolling road. Mechanized roads that moved like huge conveyor belts quirlling along on their giant rotors at speed ranging from five to one hundred miles an hour carrying the freight, the food, and the people from

city to city and coast to coast. An engineering miracle had changed the face of a nation. The automobiles and railroads vanished. The rolling roads had taken over all transportation. And no one worried over the fact that if the road should ever stop, our whole economic life would stop.

But the machinery had never failed yet. The machinery that rolled the roads was perfect. But people forgot that machinery depends on men. The men who run it. Oh, the engineers! Not the supervisors, but the engineers!